13-5g Do not confuse the effect for the cause—to explain the causality at play, you must explain what must have happened at first and what would have happened in the absence of change

Do not confuse the effect with the condition.

“Far too many writers discerning that in the evenly rotating economy entrepreneurial profits and losses would all be zero, have somehow concluded that this must be the condition for any legitimate activity on the market.”

Next:

• 13-5g1 The ERE (evenly rotating economy) is not the condition but the effect of thought experiment

Related:

• 2-1a0b ‘Thought experiment’ - Don’t limit yourself to binary thinking. Explore at least three possible solutions.
• 12-1e0 Everything changes
• On causality
  • 1-2g2s8 The unobserved parts of the wider phenomenon have in no way affected what we observe, yet they are essential to its explanation. Causation doesn’t exhaust explanation.
  • 10-2e8 Reasoning about causes and effects is reasoning about variants of the causes and effects. What would’ve happened. How it could’ve been otherwise.
  • 10-2g2e1 Our best explanation invokes abstractions including causation and the laws of physics
  • 13-3a The use of the mathematical concept of function in a science of human action is inappropriate—because it disregards time and knowledge creation (i.e., the multiverse)